I like all the pretty photos but what you ask is too much for me to comment on without suffering some sort of overload. It would trip my brain's circuit breaker for sure and there's nobody around to reset it.

A couple of simple tips tho
1) S3 and Tseng are best for DOS video.
2) I don't like AWE cards. They are troublesome.

swaaye wrote:

I like all the pretty photos but what you ask is too much for me to comment on without suffering some sort of overload. It would […]
Show full quote

I like all the pretty photos but what you ask is too much for me to comment on without suffering some sort of overload. It would trip my brain's circuit breaker for sure and there's nobody around to reset it.

A couple of simple tips tho
1) S3 and Tseng are best for DOS video.
2) I don't like AWE cards. They are troublesome.

I agree with this. The S3 VLB card should be your best choice for the 486 system. DOS compatibility is very important, and the S3 is a solid card here. For sound cards, I would use the Sound Blaster Pro 1.0, the Gravis Ultrasound Rev 3.4 and the CMS-401. While I am not familiar with Computer Music Supply, which designed the CMS-401, its chip configuration seems to indicate a true a Roland MPU-401 interface. The breakout box you describe will work to connect it to an MT-32 or SC-55. Since I assume you are playing earlier games, no game will deny you the best sound (unless it was composed for the OPL3) with this combo. Post a picture of the box or cable and we can confirm that.

For the Pentium system, if you were really into alternative 3D graphics technologies, choose the Rendition, 3dfx Voodoo 1 and NEC Power VR. Only the Rendition boasts 2D VGA compatibility, and the 2100 series may not have the same abyssmal performance issues in VGA modes that the 1000 cards had. You still need ISA sound, so you should use the Sound Blaster 16 with the NEC daughterboard for rock solid compatibility and excellent midi.

For your slot 1 system, your primary graphics card should be a Voodoo 5 if you are using a > 500MHz CPU or the fastest Voodoo 3 if you are using a <= 500MHz CPU (the STB card with the big silver heatsink is a Voodoo 3 3000). As far as sound cards go, go wild! I would put in an Audigy for EAX support, the Monster Sound MX300 for A3D support, and the Yamaha YMF-724 card for excellent DOS game support (connect it to the SB-Link on the motherboard.) If you cannot divorce yourself from an ISA sound card, the AWE64 would be a good choice if you can disable the FM, Joystick and Midi.

You have an excellent collection. I have never seen a Covox Sound Master II card before, don't just throw it away.

Rendition's plain VGA and Mode X performance is extremely slow, unfortunately. It causes a Pentium 233 to play Doom at like 10 fps. VESA modes on the other hand are very fast. This is a tragic flaw of the cards.

And regarding Voodoo3 vs. 5, I always choose 5 because it has FSAA. It adds tremendously to image quality.

@Great Hierophant

I can confirm that the CMS card is fully Roland MPU 401 compatible, using it in a 386 rig...
Have tested hundreds of games with it.

swaaye wrote:

... regarding Voodoo3 vs. 5, I always choose 5 because it has FSAA. It adds tremendously to image quality.

If you temporarily removed Glide from the equation, would you still choose a Voodoo 5500 card instead of a Geforce 2/3/4 card? The V5's general image quality (eg at the Desktop) doesn't seem as sharp as say a GF3 or GF4, and the V5's double fan noise can be a bit grating at times.

The slower STB manufactured 16-bit V3 card had decent general image quality, and is silent with excellent 2D/DOS performance making it a good contender for an early Pentium era set up, IMHO.

Great Hierophant wrote:

You have an excellent collection. I have never seen a Covox Sound Master II card before, don't just throw it away.

@Jan3Sobieski : Well,...uh...if you DO want to throw it away, throw it to me! I'll catch it! 😁

Yes, S3 all the way for the PCI-based 486.

When it comes to AWE soundcards, I've had more good experiences with the non-PnP cards.

If you indeed want to select an AWE card, or any other pre-AWE64 Gold card for that matter, do buy a good audio cable for it. Good stereo cables (usually more expensive - upto 8-10X than an ordinary cable) will filter and shield the electrical hiss and you won't be hearing the noise which can be heard in powered speakers even when the system is turned off. Yes, the gold plated connectors will help to reduce the noise. I've seen (heard) the differences.

EDIT : Nice pictures! You must have had a lot of patience to upload them, without shrinking the sizes!! If you can write the goodies you have in the form of words, as a list under their respective headings, like video cards, sound cards, etc., it will speed up the review and suggestions.

Malik wrote:

If you indeed want to select an AWE card, or any other pre-AWE64 Gold card for that matter, do buy a good audio cable for it. Good stereo cables (usually more expensive - upto 8-10X than an ordinary cable) will filter and shield the electrical hiss and you won't be hearing the noise which can be heard in powered speakers even when the system is turned off. Yes, the gold plated connectors will help to reduce the noise. I've seen (heard) the differences.

That's a good tip, thanks.

Cables can't do wonders.

I think you can get away without the P1-233MMX running Windows 95B
unless you really want it

retro games 100 wrote:

If you temporarily removed Glide from the equation, would you still choose a Voodoo 5500 card instead of a Geforce 2/3/4 card? The V5's general image quality (eg at the Desktop) doesn't seem as sharp as say a GF3 or GF4, and the V5's double fan noise can be a bit grating at times.

As far as I can tell, the V5 offers decent DOS performance, which neither GF will.

ux-3 wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

If you temporarily removed Glide from the equation, would you still choose a Voodoo 5500 card instead of a Geforce 2/3/4 card? The V5's general image quality (eg at the Desktop) doesn't seem as sharp as say a GF3 or GF4, and the V5's double fan noise can be a bit grating at times.

As far as I can tell, the V5 offers decent DOS performance, which neither GF will.

Ah thanks for the explanation!

Davros wrote:

I think you can get away without the P1-233MMX running Windows 95B
unless you really want it

I agree with you. The slot 1 mobo can accomodate a Celeron 266 which very roughly equates to the P1-233MMX. But if you have a good Socket 3 system, the next step up the speed ladder would be something like a P3, thus bypassing the old early Pentium era entirely.

retro games 100 wrote:

If you temporarily removed Glide from the equation, would you still choose a Voodoo 5500 card instead of a Geforce 2/3/4 card? The V5's general image quality (eg at the Desktop) doesn't seem as sharp as say a GF3 or GF4, and the V5's double fan noise can be a bit grating at times.

It depends on the games. For DirectX 3-6 and Glide games, the Voodoo5 is the #1 choice. For D3D8 and OpenGL games then the GeForce 3 becomes appealing and it has usable MSAA. However, you can't ignore that a newer and vastly faster card usually works even better for these games. A modern GPU will usually run D3D8 games perfectly.

With respect to the GF1/2, I find them not desirable for anything. They are often particularly blurry, and they have very limited anisotropic filtering and nearly useless FSAA. They also have a nasty texture compression bug that causes extreme ugly. They are interesting history of course though.

I've found my Voodoo3 and 5 cards to produce analog quality that I find excellent. I imagine that they vary though, like how I have a Matrox Millennium G200 that's rather blurry and I can't imagine that's the norm.

I think you can get away without the P1-233MMX running Windows 95B

I dunno, I think it'd make a good bridge for later DOS/early 3D games. I would keep it simple, though, to start with.

Here's what I'd personally do as a starting point...

In the 486:
-The S3 VLB card, or the S3 868 PCI card... either one should be good for both DOS and Win3.1 performance.
-The Reveal sound card. No, it's not a real Sound Blaster, but it may actually be better in some respects. It should have full SBPro compatibility, but with cleaner output than an actual SBPro, plus you also get WSS and a non-bugged wavetable header, which you can use for that daughterboard. That way, you can have a wide range of compatibility without having to deal with multiple cards. If you decide to get an MT32, add in the Roland card and you'll have pretty much all your bases covered.

For the P233MMX:
-One of the miscellaneous S3 PCI cards for 2D/DOS
-The Voodoo1, or maybe a V2 if you don't have immediate plans on playing the few V1-exclusive games
-The AWE64 Gold. Yes, it has its faults (and plenty of them), and if your board had an SBLink header, I would choose the Yamaha XG card instead. But, the AWE series was a staple of the average gaming machine in '95-'98, so it should get along well enough with games of that era, which I'm considering to be the primary focus of this machine anyway.

For the PIII:
You're kinda getting out of the DOS era here, so I'm thinking on mostly putting aside compatibility concerns there and focusing on Windows 3D games.
-The Voodoo5 or Asus V7700. Again, I'm not considering DOS performance to be that big of a concern, since you have two other machines to handle that. The Asus Geforce2 card may be the better performer here, since the V5 is more CPU limited under ~1ghz, but the V5 does give you Glide support. OTOH, I suppose you could pair the Geforce with a V2 SLI setup. I'd call it a toss-up, depending on personal preference here.
-The Diamond MX300. A3D is nice, but the primary reason I recommend this over the Audigy is because that's not a "real" Audigy you have there... it's some sort of crappy stripped-down variant, which I would expect to be... well... crappy. That CMI card might be the dark horse here, since it supposedly will do EAX 2.0 emulation, and that chipset is reputed to have very good sound quality in general.

Also, this may be the better matched machine for the PowerVR card... I seem to remember it performing at its best on PII-class machines. I'd leave it out until you need/want to use it, but if you're going to put it in anything, this would be the machine I'd choose for it.

With respect to the O.P., I hope it's OK to discuss these topics -

Regarding the GF2, I wonder if the GF-MX-440 is a worthwhile improvement in regards to the GF2's blurriness, limited anisotropic filtering, poor FSAA and that texture bug. The Gainward GF-MX-440 for instance is 128-bit and has DVI output as well as excellent VGA quality output. (Also, Vogons user "Old Thrashbarg" has mentioned you can remove the poor RF filter on GF2 cards to improve their VGA output quality.)

I'm very interested to understand precisely why the V5 is the best choice in regards to DirectX 3-6 games, compared to more powerful offerings that ATI and nVidia sold *after* the V5's demise, and which still had Win9x drivers and could therefore be used instead of the V5. Does the V5 make DirectX 3-6 games look better in terms of FSAA? Or to put this another way, when using a GF4 or ATI 8500 or ATI 9800 with windows 9x and DirectX 3-6, does their "AA image quality" simply not match that of the V5?

And what about D3D7?

Thanks a lot for any further information.

To the O.P. - For the 486 mobo, I think the STB Trio64V+ is a good card. It's got good signal quality, and is very compatible with old DOS games. Also, the Vision968 cards with the "blue coloured DAC chip" is quite nice. Another good card is the Matrox Millenium 1, but it has compatibility problems with some older games. (You mention that you have lots of other graphics cards - maybe you have some of these?)

It may be an idea to increase the speed on the P3 to beyond 600 because you may as well get all the power you can get to help you out with the sound and vision of intense 3D games. If you can get one, the Powerleap adapter with a Celeron 1.4Ghz is a great retro investment.

Videologic Apocalypse 5d Sonic. 2D, 3D and audio in one package.

retro games 100 wrote:

Regarding the GF2, I wonder if the GF-MX-440 is a worthwhile improvement in regards to the GF2's blurriness, limited anisotropic filtering, poor FSAA and that texture bug....

GF4MX is as fast as GF2 GTS/Ultra but much more efficient and with somewhat superior FSAA support. They are only DX7-level cards though and so are not good if you want to play later games.

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm very interested to understand precisely why the V5 is the best choice in regards to DirectX 3-6 games, compared to more powerful offerings that ATI and nVidia sold *after* the V5's demise, and which still had Win9x drivers and could therefore be used instead of the V5. Does the V5 make DirectX 3-6 games look better in terms of FSAA? Or to put this another way, when using a GF4 or ATI 8500 or ATI 9800 with windows 9x and DirectX 3-6, does their "AA image quality" simply not match that of the V5?

Because on a machine playing D3D 3-6 games you're also probably going to be playing Glide games and a Voodoo card tends to work the best with all of these because 3dfx got a lot of developer attention and fine tuning back then.

FSAA on the Voodoo5 is "rotated-grid supersampling". It not only eliminates aliasing on geometry but also improves texture quality. Other cards can do this too though. The big deal with Voodoo5 is that it can do it on old games usually without problem and this is wonderful. And it can anti-alias Glide games which nothing else can do. I only consider other cards once the Voodoo5 isn't fast enough anymore and that happens with once you get into D3D7 territory.

Other good supersampling cards include the GeForce FX and newer cards. These have various SSAA modes available via Rivatuner and by the officially-supported "8x" and "6xS" AA modes. Those two modes are combinations MSAA and SSAA. This is probably the best aspect to GeForce FX, aside from OpenGL goodness. The GeForce cards up to 7900 support these AA modes AFAIK.

ATI cards prior to R300 (9500+) did have supersampling but it was buggy as I recall. Also, Radeon 8500 takes a 50% performance hit with 2X FSAA, and something like 75% at 4X, so it's only going to be usable with old games.

swaaye wrote:

I like all the pretty photos but what you ask is too much for me to comment on without suffering some sort of overload. It would […]
Show full quote

I like all the pretty photos but what you ask is too much for me to comment on without suffering some sort of overload. It would trip my brain's circuit breaker for sure and there's nobody around to reset it.

A couple of simple tips tho
1) S3 and Tseng are best for DOS video.
2) I don't like AWE cards. They are troublesome.

Sorry, I didn't realize at first that it can be a little "too much."

-Based on other replies (thanks Hierophant!), S3 for the 486 is the way to go. (It's unfortunate I don't have the Tseng)
-Why are the AWE cards troublesome in your experience?

swayee wrote:

Rendition's plain VGA and Mode X performance is extremely slow, unfortunately. It causes a Pentium 233 to play Doom at like 10 fps.

That's not going to work then. Doom 2/1 and clones are on the list of "to be played." I'm not familiar with Mode X. Examples?

Malik wrote:

@Jan3Sobieski : Well,...uh...if you DO want to throw it away, throw it to me! I'll catch it! Very Happy

Since it didn't get any votes here, sure, I can send it your way. There's one little problem though. I bought it about 6 years ago at a thrift store and never tested it. Looking at the solder spots on the back, it seems like some caps/resistors have been replaced so I honestly don't even know if it works. If I had the drivers/settings to test it out and it worked, I'd be more than happy to send it to you. It's not going to do me any good here. If you can do anything with it, I'll even cover the shipping (if you're in the USA, if not, maybe we can split it? EDIT: I just checked. If you're really located in Malaysia, cheapest shipping would be $12.78 so that's not too bad, I can cover that, find me drivers so I can test it first!).

Malik wrote:

If you indeed want to select an AWE card, or any other pre-AWE64 Gold card for that matter, do buy a good audio cable for it.

I'm actually a little bit into car audio and have acquired many cables over the years, so I do have some higher quality ones I can use. However, I'm not biased towards any sound card. That's why I'm here asking questions 😉

Davros wrote:

I think you can get away without the P1-233MMX running Windows 95B
unless you really want it

I really want it 😉 Like I wrote in the OP, more of a nostalgia kind of thing. Plus I'd like to have a win95 machine with directx5 and then a win98 with directx7.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Davros wrote:

I think you can get away without the P1-233MMX running Windows 95B
unless you really want it

I dunno, I think it'd make a good bridge for later DOS/early 3D games. I would keep it simple, though, to start with.

My thinking as well!

retro games 100 wrote:

With respect to the O.P., I hope it's OK to discuss these topics -

I encourage it!

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

For the P233MMX: -One of the miscellaneous S3 PCI cards for 2D/DOS -The Voodoo1, or maybe a V2 if you don't have immediate plans […]
Show full quote

For the P233MMX:
-One of the miscellaneous S3 PCI cards for 2D/DOS
-The Voodoo1, or maybe a V2 if you don't have immediate plans on playing the few V1-exclusive games
-The AWE64 Gold. Yes, it has its faults (and plenty of them), and if your board had an SBLink header, I would choose the Yamaha XG card instead. But, the AWE series was a staple of the average gaming machine in '95-'98, so it should get along well enough with games of that era, which I'm considering to be the primary focus of this machine anyway.

For the PIII:
You're kinda getting out of the DOS era here, so I'm thinking on mostly putting aside compatibility concerns there and focusing on Windows 3D games.
-The Voodoo5 or Asus V7700. Again, I'm not considering DOS performance to be that big of a concern, since you have two other machines to handle that. The Asus Geforce2 card may be the better performer here, since the V5 is more CPU limited under ~1ghz, but the V5 does give you Glide support. OTOH, I suppose you could pair the Geforce with a V2 SLI setup. I'd call it a toss-up, depending on personal preference here.
-The Diamond MX300. A3D is nice, but the primary reason I recommend this over the Audigy is because that's not a "real" Audigy you have there... it's some sort of crappy stripped-down variant, which I would expect to be... well... crappy. That CMI card might be the dark horse here, since it supposedly will do EAX 2.0 emulation, and that chipset is reputed to have very good sound quality in general.

Also, this may be the better matched machine for the PowerVR card... I seem to remember it performing at its best on PII-class machines. I'd leave it out until you need/want to use it, but if you're going to put it in anything, this would be the machine I'd choose for it.

Wow, you've just given me so many other options... Damn...

retro games 100 wrote:

It may be an idea to increase the speed on the P3 to beyond 600 because you may as well get all the power you can get to help you out with the sound and vision of intense 3D games. If you can get one, the Powerleap adapter with a Celeron 1.4Ghz is a great retro investment.

I was thinking about that. What's the fastest I could go with the BX6 rev2 with latest bios?

Also, here is the pic of the CMS 401 cable.
I don't have the MT-32 nor the SC-55, can I still use this?

Again, thank you for all the replies. Still some questions remain:
- What's the diff between the two GUS cards I have?
- I read somewhere that the SB16 connected to the DB can have some frozen/stuck notes? What's that all about? Should I be concerned?
- On the rev 2.4 of the GUS, can I add more ram chips? Is there a point? Why?
- and shoot, last question, where the hell can I get an SB-Link cable?

Last thing I'd like to point out. 99% of the gaming will take place in my little dungeon with headphones on, I'm not sure if that makes any difference, but just throwing it out there.

Jan3Sobieski wrote:

- I read somewhere that the SB16 connected to the DB can have some frozen/stuck notes? What's that all about? Should I be concerned?
- On the rev 2.4 of the GUS, can I add more ram chips? Is there a point? Why?
- and shoot, last question, where the hell can I get an SB-Link cable?

From my Experience taking a better third party SB Pro/WSS compatible card with Waveblaster connector is a good way to go. You won't have stuck notes and there are just a few games that really utilize 16 bit and these games will have GUS or WSS support. So no SB16 with stuck notes and missing low pass filter.
Use the 3.4 GUS. RAM on a GUS is crucial, because the GUS concept relies on the wavetable RAM. Everything the GUS plays goes to the RAM first. Though once it plays, it does it independently.